Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Black Higher Education Administrators: Reflections on Illusions of Change

Abstract

Over the past two decades, universities and colleges in Canada have increasingly styled themselves as being deeply invested in addressing anti-Black racism, coloniality, and histories of exclusion. To address these long-standing grievances, academic institutions have ramped up and mass-promoted the implementation of equity-focused initiatives such as equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) offices; executive-level EDI positions; race-based data collection; EDI working groups; subcommittees and councils; anti-racism charters; statements of solidarity; and EDI training and workshops. In this article, the author argues that these efforts have done nothing to meaningfully address entrenched inequities present at every level of academic institutions. Of particular focus is the role of the Black administrator, who, the author argues, is hired to nullify dissent within the institution while manufacturing optics of diversity and progress. Drawing on the author’s own experience as a former college dean, this article first provides examples of how these strategies amount to a nullification of dissent. The author argues that universities and colleges have become sophisticated in stifling legitimate challenges to hierarchies of power through incorporating and co-opting calls for change. The author shows how such practices not only undermine radical demands for change but also provide ways for institutions to maintain their racial capitalist, neoliberal objectives. In thinking about what may yet be possible in “another university,” the author reviews a set of principles derived from Black radical tradition and Black queer feminist theory, which point to ways in which we may move toward an alternative learning commons or what others refer to as the “off-university” or the “undercommons.” Extending on the concepts of the “Black test” and an “ethics of care,” the author suggests some fundamental criteria for moving toward transformed academic institutions while also addressing ways in which we can rethink notions of Black leadership that are too often deployed to frustrate calls for change.